So, yesterday I took another load of calves to the auction...



Calves raised here by me, and sold at the local cattle auction. No surprises so far. But wait...

I get to the auction, and talk to the owner of the auction. He tells me they are expecting to sell between 2500 and 3000 head on Tuesday. That he hopes the market maintains the level it is now. (Which isn't great, but fair.)

He told me prices were off a bit last Tuesday because feedlots were past full capacity, and the cattle buyers for the beef market had no place to go with feeder calves coming to market.

SOoooo... Feedlots are at capacity, with no room for more.

Yet, many grocery store meat market shelves are empty, or lacking.... And beef is $10-20 per pound when it is available. And I'll be lucky to get $1.50 a pound for #1 type feeder calves.

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We can conclude that demand is very high, and shelf stock is low.

Auction prices are low.

Price of beef at the consumer level is out of sight expensive.

The packing company mafia is FIXING THE MARKET!


It ain't "inflation" folks. Some of it is... But the majority of this is Market Fixing.

Buttigieg, all by design.

Farmers are running into the same, the supply chain has been shut down

Sell them from the farm ....

Walmart here had 80% burger at $5/pound a few days ago. (I wasn’t a buyer, just a wanderer through).

That's an option.

But local packing companies that slaughter beef are booked solid into 2022 a few months right now.

Unless you have the knowledge and equipment to kill, hang and process beef, it brings you back to square one.

I heard a news blip a couple of months back that stopped me dead in my tracks for a instant.

It was something along the lines of
"major food and goods retailers are sitting on stock in their warehouses and DC's expecting major inflation"

This could be interpreted in two different ways.
Corporate greed?

Kroger & Walmart were mentioned along with a few others.

Once a beef is killed, you have a very limited time to hold onto it. Once it's frozen, or preserved in any way, it cannot be sold as "fresh beef".

Yeah, my post wasn't so much about this particular issue but more of a mindset of the big corps.

Processors have to use 'other' workarounds to obtain the same result.

Squeeze the producer, rape the consumer.

Walmart's position is that they will only sell "Walmart genetics" cattle; i.e. cattle produced from bull semen purchased from Walmart.

Processing is definitely the bottleneck, with a big lack of small, local processors. The Democrats want to regulate them out of existence, and the Republicans (Thanks, Sonny Perdue!) are happy to let the big meat packers squeeze them out of business.

The North East Regional Correctional facility near Duluth MN, also AKA The Work Farm, butchers beef, hogs, fowl, all of it for a nominal fee.

I had a hog done a few years ago, killed and quartered for $25.

https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Zip=55779&ID=273009001561

Maybe there is something similar near you.

A lot of market manipulation going on in every sector. A very few years ago, maybe 4 years, I remember news blurbs from oil execs on Faux Business that once crude got above 65 bucks, a lot of domestic production kicks in and we need not import. OK, it's 85 bucks now...where is the domestic production? Does the office of the US Prez have that much power to regulate the oil industry? Can one man's signature choke the most vital resource in our economy?

Barry, I'd like to feed out those calves!

More of this needs to occur:

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/17/...use-united-states-department-agricuture/

Competition is good.

Huh?

Everybody around here is booked at least a year out. Several outfits have stopped taking wild game.

I do suspect that the high prices of grain and hay make finishing a beef quite a bit more expensive right now. I’d be pretty careful with how many head I’d put on feed right now, if I were in the feedlot business. Easy to buy high and end up selling into a future low.

Buckled in for the ride , 300+ ready to go.sold s few to friends, but I dont have enough friends ,

I very seriously doubt that Walmart gives a rats ass about what bull semen get into their supply chain.

Let’s go Brandon.

Interesting. I think we're definitely reaching a point where people need figure out how to do for themselves. I know several people that are raising meat and marketing and selling locally. I too have acquired a handful of cattle recently and am trying to figure out how to market them.

Processing meat is definitely a bottle neck. Some friends went as far as looking into buying a small processor. I know my grandfather used to hang them in the barn and process himself during the winter when the weather was cool. Though, not sure how hard it is to butcher cattle. I've processed 30 or so deer and elk over my life so I in my uneducated opinion would guess that would be similar with more of it.

On another note, I just bought a trailer identical to yours. Haven't pulled it yet, but a friend I trust tells me the people out in West Texas that started that company make a quality product and are good people.

We made a bull into hamburger once. Just like a deer. Only a quarter is the whole size of a deer…

I would expect a big dump of auction cattle this month as people pull cows off of summer graze. Winter hay is short so lots of people will be thinning herds to make it through winter. Packing houses are chit jobs, in the current environment I imagine most are short of workers. So there may be some bottlenecks in processing. And yes, packing houses are pretty much mafia like.

Cheesy is right.

WalMart sells "Angus" beef for a premium, and have entered into the genetics game.

https://www.newsweek.com/meet-top-game-bull-whos-fathering-next-generation-walmarts-beef-1509724

If I'd only known, I'd have dropped them off at your place!

Cheesy was wrong. Looks like Walmart is partnering with 44 Farms (driven by it dozens of times, wife grew up 8 miles from it in Central Texas) and testing “their” genetics in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.

I’d reckon we are a long long way from Walmart only selling meat that they’ve had their hands on the semen that produced the steer sold in all their stores though. Too many pounds of beef pass through their stores for that. But, they’ll keep going at it, driving the small producers out until they’re in control of that market as well.

Market's too big for that, I'm thinking.

I remember when McDonald's bought thousands and thousands of dairy Holstein steers, and fattened them on summer graze, then sent them to their own packing plants to be turned into hamburger.

They may have personally made enough to make it worthwhile, but even a big operation is just a drop in the bucket to nationwide demand.